Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda

By Shakirah E. Hudani

An examination of planning, place, and the politics of repair in post-genocide Rwanda.

Master Plans and Minor Acts examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation?

Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226832746

Book preview

Cover Page for Master Plans and Minor Acts

Master Plans and Minor Acts

Master Plans and Minor Acts

Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda

SHAKIRAH E. HUDANI

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83273-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83272-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83274-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226832746.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hudani, Shakirah E., author.

Title: Master plans and minor acts : repairing the city in post-genocide Rwanda / Shakirah E. Hudani.

Other titles: Repairing the city in post-genocide Rwanda

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023037920 | ISBN 9780226832739 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226832722 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226832746 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns—Rwanda—Kigali. | Peace-building—Rwanda. | Rwanda—Politics and government—1994–

Classification: LCC DT450.44 .H83 2024 | DDC 967.57104/3—dc23/eng/20230912

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023037920

This paper meets the requirements of ANS/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

A genocide is not just any kind of story, with a beginning and an end between which more or less ordinary events take place.

BOUBACAR BORIS DIOP¹

We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS²

Contents

Significant Abbreviations

Introduction

1  A Material Politics of Repair

PART 1. Master Plans

2  Repair in Old Kigali

3  The Project of Reformation

4  A Pedagogy of Wounds

PART 2. Minor Acts

5  Political Abandonment

6  Peripheral Conscription

7  Rural Imagining

Conclusion

Coda  Reckonings

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

References

Index

Significant Abbreviations

BBTG: broad-based transitional government (set up by the Arusha Accords)

CBD: central business district

CHC: community hygiene club

COK: City of Kigali

CND: Conseil nationale de developpement (earlier name for the parliament building)

CNLG: National Commission for the Fight against Genocide

CSS: Centralized Sewerage System (planned for Kigali)

FAR: Rwandan Armed Forces (under the Habyarimana government)

FARG: National Fund for Genocide Survivors

FDI: foreign direct investment

GOR: Government of Rwanda

HRW: Human Rights Watch

HRZ: high-risk zone

ICTR: UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

IDP: Rural Integrated Development Program

INMR: Institute of National Museums of Rwanda

MRND: National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Habyarimana’s party during the Rwandan second republic)

NISR: National Institute of Statistics Rwanda

NGO: nongovernmental organization

NRM: National Resistance Movement (Uganda)

NST1: National Strategy for Transformation

NURC: National Unity and Reconciliation Commission

ONAPO: National Office of Population (active in the pre-1994 period)

OSC: one-stop center

Parmehutu: Parti du mouvement pour l’emancipation Hutu (also known as MDR-Parmehutu; Kayibanda’s party in the Rwandan first republic)

PPP: public-private partnership

RDF: Rwanda Defense Forces

RGB: Rwanda Governance Board

RPA: Rwandan Patriotic Army

RPF: Rwandan Patriotic Front

SMU: Saemaul Undong (South Korea’s New Village Movement)

RTLM: Radio Television Libre Mille Collines (extremist radio station active during the 1994 genocide)

TNA: Transitional National Assembly (name of Parliament building between 1994 and 2003)

WBG: World Bank Group

WDI: World Bank world development indicator

Introduction

Master Plans and Minor Acts is a study of the violence of large-scale spatial planning in traumatized geographies, focused on urban transformation in post-genocide Rwanda. It is a story of how repair and conciliation are enacted, and how political expression and belonging are reconfigured around place. In a terrain starkly delimited by top-down master plans of various orders, spatial repair is an aperture for thinking through a material politics of cohabitation. In other words, I ask what remains unfinished, drawing attention to the politics of reinhabiting the present rather than erasing its vestiges in the physical environment.

The City as a Scale of Repair

This story begins in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, but its narrative threads are not localized in the city alone. Rather, changing urban space and imaginaries of the city form the focal points of this account. In mid-2018 I was sitting in a bureaucrat’s office in the diplomatic area of Kigali, discussing the Rwandan positions on issues related to a key international conference: the World Urban Forum, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, earlier that year. The theme of the conference was Cities 2030—Cities for All: Implementing the New Urban Agenda, and on the table was the issue of the moment: a call for a global right to the city, and a training agenda for mainstreaming this vision into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). As we conversed, a car blared loud music outside the office building—a rare occurrence. The bureaucrat stared past my chair—past the bookshelf that held selected urban reports, as well as a copy of From Third World to First, the autobiography of Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew—and toward the guards visible outside the building. The radio was soon silenced.

A right to the city? the bureaucrat said. We in Kigali cannot support an unconditional right to the city in this country that has been through genocide. He confided that the issue was silently contentious in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy working to remake urban space in the capital. Rwanda is often compared to Singapore in the speed and scale of its developmental policy ambitions, and hence this scene in its totality—the blaring music silenced by guards, the orderly office and its shelved books, and my interlocutor’s statements—appeared to me at that moment to approximate too closely the often repeated Singapore of Africa claims that the global media so frequently write and reiterate. I left the office thinking about these statements on what I began to think of as the right to the city after genocide, or a broader right to the city after conflict.

As Henri Lefebvre formulated it, the right to the city identifies urban space as key to cultural expression, economic struggle, and political opportunity, and situates it as a synecdoche for society, central to the imaginative geographies of the nation-state and the social mobilities of the citizen (in Marcuse 2009: 244).¹ As Rwanda’s postconflict context discloses to us, the right to the city is not an ubiquitously heralded concept but a contested one, with multiple local meanings and interpretations. In their plans and blueprints, Rwandan policy makers are quick to put forth a popularized conception of the right to the city as key to their plans for urban design, and highlight Kigali as an urban space to support innovative design and green city visions (Republic of Rwanda 2015). Yet, as plans for urban transformation increase displacement and regulation in and around the capital, we must question what happens to urban equity and spatial justice in and around Kigali. Might a vision of urban change focused on a reparative ethics after conflict call for renewed reading of the spatiality of repair through and beyond current frames of restorative justice? While Lefebvre’s concept situates some of my questioning, at its core I am more interested in the problematic of urban repair after conflict. What do urban dispossession and repair mean for rebuilding life in the long aftermath of genocide and civil conflict, and how do they tie together built and social environments in and beyond the city?

Since 2000, large-scale changes have been underway in the urban space of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, as part of reordering the city and planning anew its social and material infrastructures. Master Plans and Minor Acts resituates discussions about post-genocide and postconflict repair and reckoning in the materiality of the city. I focus on what it means to dislocate the national as the sole site of redress and to look instead at levels of repair—and dispossession—that exist at the scale of the city. Decentering the preoccupation with the nation-state as the sole community of collective memory (Halbwachs 1992 [1941]; Renan 2018 [1882]), and thus of collective reckoning, brings into view additional forms of repair. The urban scale permits us to ask new questions about the materiality of social repair (chapter 1). The city condenses sociomaterial relations and posits shared national futures; it is a central space that conveys the stakes of national visioning and the materiality of the conciliation imperative to people living together in close proximity. The foundations for rebuilding in the city, and the shared ties that enable neighbors to forge conciliation and cooperation in relation to the built environment, the neighborhood, and the home, invite us to consider spatial relations as templates for the construction of a more inclusive social order. These practices of living with the past push back against and subvert the idea that societies riven with conflict and traumatic pasts can and should use erasure and complete spatial reorganization (master plans) as a basis for national rebuilding.

This book is inspired by traditions of bridging scholarship between the present temporality of the city and the scalar continuity of work on the postconflict state, and accordingly speaks to literature in urban studies, human geography, and African studies. I draw on and extend the work of scholars of postconflict space in African cities—such as Danny Hoffman on Monrovia (2007, 2017); Filip De Boeck on Kinshasa (2014); and Claudia Gastrow (2017), Ricardo Cardoso (2016), and Antonio Tomás (2022) on Luanda. I theorize large-scale planning in a postconflict society as a form of erasure that performs different forms of extraordinary violence through the built environment, privileging planning over forms of memory and organic remembrance. Planning here serves to reinscribe social memory and unmoor place, following mass violence and attempted cohabitation. Instead, I argue normatively for sociospatial continuities and small-scale practices of rebuilding (minor acts) as the basis for an enduring and equitable peace. These minor acts provide a foundation for relational repair between and beyond existing governmental structures and the transnational capitalist repurposing of urban terrain in the country.

Yet the material foundations of exchange and repair in daily life also show that urbanizing repair is in progress and incomplete: it operates without the full and final closure of state-orchestrated reconciliation, neoliberal apology, and the obligation to offer complete forgiveness. Instead material repair is a necessarily limited interpersonal endeavor that accepts both the need for relational conciliation and the irreparability of issues of lost life. It is by acknowledging that certain questions in postconflict environments are invariably irreparable that repair gains grounds for what is still possible to speak of and to rebuild.

Revisiting Kibuye

My engagement with the changing spatiality of Rwanda’s towns and cities began when I visited Kibuye some eight years after the end of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, as a student studying the transitional justice process.² At the time, this seemingly serene town on the edge of Lake Kivu and not far from the border with the Congo was still recovering from the trauma of 1994, when it had been a center of the genocide in the western part of the country. Records show that at least 59,050 ethnic Tutsis were killed in Kibuye and the Gitesi commune in the early part of the genocide, from early April to mid-May 1994. Many of these victims were massacred in the Gatwaro football stadium, and others in the town center and the Catholic parish church (Verwimp 2004, using data from Ibuka). The condensed spatial landscape at Kibuye’s center that I observed in 2002, and its specific texture, preoccupied me in the intervening years until I returned for research on urban change in 2018. Although much of this book focuses on urban transformation in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, the spatiality of Kibuye’s center has been embedded in my mind as I have written this book, and its town center forms the setting of the complex scenes that I narrate below. These scenes connect national postconflict transition and urban transformation in a densely concentrated web of social and material relations. As observed over time, the reorganization of life in Kibuye forms a palimpsest of post-genocide erasure and spatial reinscription.

KIBUYE, 2002

In 2002 the center of Kibuye had four distinct areas: a bustling informal market area; the Kibuye central prison, which housed thousands of inmates, mostly genocide suspects awaiting trials in gacaca community courts and higher-level courts of justice; the Gatwaro stadium on the other side of the road; and a makeshift genocide memorial. The commemoration sign on the outside of the stadium compound read:

Cimetery

More than 10,000 people were inhumated here.

Official ceremony was presided over by H. E. Pasteur Bizimungu,

President of the Republic of Rwanda,

April 26, 1995.

A low wooden fence separated the stadium as the site of massacre from the fourth space, the modest memorial next to it, constructed informally by survivors and residents of the area. Across the road, the central prison was a buzzing mass of industrial-like activity, with inmates dressed in pink shorts and shirts confined behind a main gate and a low fence and wall. In my field notes I recorded that I was struck by the cacophony of contested memory embodied in this concentrated space, and the unstable boundaries that separated the site of the massacre from the memorial site, the prison from external space—from the space of the market and the rhythms of daily life. It was this very permeability that characterized the spatial ordering of Kibuye’s town center, and the difficulty of separating its multiple spatialized narratives, that struck me as a microcosm of a complex and ambivalent spatial ecology.

I found this spatial ecology expressed to varying degrees across the country itself, and writ large, in 2002. At that time, the state was nearing the end of the period of official governmental transition after the genocide of 1994. During the one hundred days of the genocide, between five to eight hundred thousand ethnic Tutsis and additional moderate Hutus were massacred in a wave of violence that ran from April to July 1994 (Des Forges 1999; Prunier 1997). Nested within a larger civil war from 1990 onward, as the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) guerrilla force invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda, the period of genocide was perhaps the starkest and most visible violence in a regional conflict that has been described as Africa’s World War and which has continued to engulf areas of the eastern Congo (Prunier 2008; Stearns 2022).³ Heralded by a new constitution in 2003 and the start of a new period of governance (often referred to as the New Rwanda) under President Paul Kagame, the period of transition that followed was supplanted by a powerful developmentalist master narrative of national progress, and ambitious programs to rapidly modernize the country. Nevertheless, in 2002 social spaces in the town—spaces of quotidian memory, contested narratives, and vital post-genocide life—were still visible ruptures and open wounds in the official ordering of a new state and a new national society. I began to question: How does constructing a new national identity entail a reordering of space?⁴

Despite the wounds and ruptures spatially evident in the Kibuye of 2002, these condensed spaces in the town were open for circulation. Different groups of people shared common spaces, confronted each other on shared paths to the bus stop, and interacted in the bustling old market. These interactions were often uncomfortable and traumatic for survivors of the genocide who had to coinhabit urban areas. While meetings in shared space created moments of tension, the realm of the encounter was also a space of potential conciliation: living together as a process that might unfold incrementally. These spaces were hence places of everyday routine. Rather than seeing reconciliation as an event or as a singular meeting point, I found that relations with neighbors evolved over time, as trust was gradually rebuilt on faltering structures.

KARONGI, 2018

On my next visit to the area, in 2018, the town had changed. Not only did it have a new name, Karongi, but touristic enterprise had expanded, creating new areas of development. The town now had a centrally located methane gas generation plant, and strictly regulated fish farming was taking place where small-scale fishermen had once dominated. The prison had also been moved to a rural location in accordance with a national policy to deconcentrate prison development in urban areas, leaving in its stead empty spaces and disused buildings. Although Karongi was not one of the six secondary cities designed for master-planned rehabilitation according to the national governmental road map on green city development (Republic of Rwanda and GGGI 2015), the stark spatial juxtaposition I had seen in the Kibuye of 2002 was now absent. The heterotopic spatiality of the early post-genocide period was slowly being replaced in built environments around the country with a form of blueprint utopia (Holston 1989): ordered, planned spaces of green urbanism put into place by master-planning and its attendant large-scale dispossession.

The spatial ordering of the early post-genocide years that I recorded in Kibuye in 2002 was a condensed miniature of Rwanda’s post-genocide society at the time: the town’s spatial and normative boundaries transgressed through unspeakable violence, the debris of genocide still visible in its cities, and a multiplicity of narratives lodged in its informal settlements and old towns. In contrast, plans to remake Rwanda’s urban spaces since the early 2000s have sought to reinvent space through order and concepts of the placeless model urban. If Kibuye’s central areas in 2002 were a particular heterogeneity of place, then the world-class master-planning of the capital, Kigali, and its secondary city poles by international architectural consultants advances the idea of fungible policy, generic space, and spatial transfer: these redesigned cities subvert and ignore the specificity of local places and their particular architectures of space with designs and plans that could be located anywhere.

THE THREE MASTER PLANS

The foundations of violent spatiality in Central Africa today are durable and well entrenched. This book takes as its premise that three master plans operate in Rwanda in its current moment of post-genocide transition and urban transformation. I read master plans broadly here, as state forms of reordering and reorganization in mnemonic, social, and spatial terms. While I do not make explicit reference to these three modes of organizing space and memory throughout my chapters, their specters haunt all aspects of this text. The first plan of ordering is a master plan of state aftermaths, which takes the organized violence of the genocide of 1994 as its primary case but operates within wider contexts. This master plan considers the iterative programs of state-orchestrated violence that have affected the country since its independence in 1962—resulting in the generational exile of Rwandan Tutsis in the 1950s and 1970s—and speaks to themes of home, homeland, and belonging in Rwanda over time. This conception of the master plan extends into the borderlands of the eastern Congo, a region marked by its sheer complexity, its ethnic and geographic fissures, and the politicization of space and memory that operates within its traumatized terrain.

The second master plan, the master plan of the colonial present, extends and illuminates the first.⁵ It exposes the entangled nature of colonial violence and programs of transformation over time. As I show in various chapters in this book, forms of top-down ordering and racialized planning were central to German and Belgian colonialism in Central Africa. Colonialism was itself a type of master plan, devised from its center and iteratively revised through the technologies of top-down planning and violent governance. Colonial governance fixed and racialized ethnicity, and segmented space and mobility for the colonized in both urban and rural areas. In doing so, colonial governance set the conditions for the post-colonial violence that has unfolded in Rwanda throughout successive decades. While this book does not explore the legacy of the colonial period in depth, its enduring imprints are present everywhere in social life and spatial organization in the extended life of colonial presence (Stoler 2016; Purdeková and Mwambari 2022).

The third master plan is the contemporary spatial master plan of postcrisis fix: transnationally orchestrated spatial master planning, with its own legacies of destruction and segmentation, moving into post-genocide terrain from regions of post–financial crisis fix in East Asia (chapter 1). Spatial master planning as a form of total spatial reordering also has a longer genealogy that dates back to the violence of colonial interventions in Africa and Asia (as analyzed in Rabinow 1992; Wright 1991; King 2012; Home 2013; and others), the functional zoning and monumental architecture of modernist cities such as Brasilia and Chandigarh (Holston 1989), and earlier experimentation with total spatial change in Europe (as is famously chronicled in Harvey 2004, on Baron Haussmann’s modernization of Paris). This book takes the third form of master-planning as its ostensible theme and titular referent, but it is within the frame of the other two master plans that spatial erasure and transformation must be interpreted and understood in Rwanda today. The Kigali 2050 spatial master plan is a case of postcrisis planning, legible not just on its own terms but against the backdrop of other forms of master planning that have displaced populations and reorganized space over time in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa.

In this book I question the meanings and motives of large-scale planning in postconflict geographies. Forms of master planning in Rwanda depoliticize the built environment as a medium of ongoing spatial violence. Yet the space of the built environment is an inherently political milieu. Urbicide and more granular forms of violence against place show this when they efface lived connections that are embedded in social routines, embodied through homes, and kept alive through interpersonal relations (Coward 2008). Mass displacement effectively cuts off spatial genealogies, and excises modes of knowing that are physically embedded in the present. Accordingly, I look to repoliticize the built environment and the spatial renovation of towns and cities in a country where spatial change is intertwined with the experience of mass trauma and projects of transformation at various scales.⁶ Identities remain splintered between and within regional, class, and ethnic lines here, and memory runs discontinuously between generations. Place instead gives mooring to different forms of social memory, and is hinged into modes of recollecting even as the project of spatial transformation proceeds apace.

As this book shows, master-planned spatial models are a type of transplantable spatial fantasy that seeks to dismantle the everyday conditions of post-genocide space and social relations through removing bricks and mortar and demolishing existing edifices of concrete. By reordering space, the state reinscribes a new national narrative of progress, and delimits those who can feasibly circulate in and access the renewed city. Such master planning effectively constricts the possibility of heterogeneous, lived encounters in shared space and an ethos of popular participation and coexistence in the city. Considering the spatial and the temporal together demands that we think beyond master plans of various forms, looking instead toward the topological space of the city as a material space for repair and coexistence in the present. I examine transformation in and around Rwanda’s towns and cities as an extended case of social change in a country that has moved from trauma and rupture to erasure and renewal (Burawoy 2009). Trauma here is manifest spatially, and can be told or traced through the remaking of place. Such remaking constrains the encounter face-to-face and conditions the forms of interaction and reckoning that can be held in a society still coming to terms with its various pasts (Levinas 1979).

Research Methods

I conducted research on Rwanda in two phases, from 2002 to 2004 and from 2018 to 2020. During the first period I conducted research on the transitional justice process in the country, to understand the rifts and contradictions of the post-genocide period. I spent six months attending inaugural inkiko-gacaca community court sessions, visiting prisons and interviewing genocide prisoners, conducting interviews on national transition with officials struggling to address the judicial overload in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, and interrogating the process of transition alongside local and international aid and civil society organizations, many of which were present in the country during this research period.⁷ When I returned for thirteen months of research beginning in 2018, my understandings of the rapid development and ambitious urban plans for Kigali and secondary cities in Rwanda were broadly informed by the earlier time I had spent in the country, where I had found myself witness to a very different spatial and social order. This earlier spatial order was one still in formation: it was yet unchanged by the green urban aesthetics that would later come to characterize the capital. This previous social fabric was struggling with rifts visibly expressed through spaces of transition, such as the prison, and palpable through the discursive theater of the gacaca community court.

During the second period, my research focused on interviews with policy makers and planners in private practice, on studies of informal settlements and old neighborhoods in Kigali and in the urban periphery of Bugesera District—increasingly under threat by master-planned urbanism—and on interviews with residents and local leaders. I also attended participatory planning meetings in Bugesera District, held to oversee the master-planning and regularization of land in peri-urban areas bordering Kigali. I studied two integrated development program (IDP) model villages: in Bugesera District (Rweru Village) and in the north of Rwanda. Next, I conducted research on security and hygiene competitions in Kigali, under the ambit of the City of Kigali and focusing on Rwezamenyo and Gitega Sectors in Kigali. I also revisited Kibuye/Karongi and rural sectors where I had earlier conducted research. Outside Rwanda, I conducted several interviews with Rwandans in the diaspora, and with policy experts living in Nairobi, Kenya. Finally, I amassed an extensive collection of official policy documents related to the transitional state programs implemented from the late 1990s onward, and the plans and policies for urban transformation in the contemporary period.

I conducted semistructured and in-depth interviews with Rwandans in various spheres of my research—from policy offices to rural model villages—and used English, French, Kiswahili, and certain amounts of Kinyarwanda. I worked with a Kinyarwanda translator and research assistant in some of these settings, who accompanied me and helped when my language skills fumbled. Making newer friendships in the context of research and reviving older connections, I sought through my inquiries to understand how urban change connected personal histories and the built environment intertemporally. As a woman of South Asian ethnic background from East Africa and North America, who spent considerable time in Nairobi while growing up, my positionality during research has been inflected by the dynamics of being familiar with the cultural geography of East and Central Africa. Yet because of this background, I am simultaneously identified as an unfamiliar figure from elsewhere in the Rwandan research terrain. Ethnicity, class, race, gender, and citizenship have all had a large impact on how I was accepted and responded to in my various research sites. Much more can be written of this positionality: what it affords in terms of proximity to the East African social context, the forging of social theory by an African researcher, and also the challenges of conducting research in Rwanda’s tightly surveilled environment as it changed across time periods. In this interdisciplinary work, I have chosen to ground my writing in the built environment as its primary texture, with the hope that my reflexivity emerges through the text. Relatedly, for reasons of the safety of my research interlocutors I have anonymized their identities—and at times their locations or identifiable surroundings—with the exception of interviewees whose views and stories appeared in Rwandan newspapers and were thus public knowledge due to their experiences or social positions.

My research methods have been largely qualitative, focused on in-depth and semistructured interviews, focus group discussions, and observation. I also draw on archival methods and textual analysis of primary and secondary sources, such as newspaper articles and policy documents. Throughout my second period of research, my concerns were grounded in the built environment and residents’ interactions with its changing structures and milieus. The built environment textured my interactions, yet gave them a solid basis in practices of planning and changes in the environment and in the space of the home. While Rwandans of many walks of life are hesitant to trust and speak on the political situation in the country, the nature of commentary and complaint in relation to the scale of the home, the neighborhood, and questions of possession and dispossession